AUTODESK CIVIL 3D CAD MANAGER’S GUIDE
3
Chapter 1: Autodesk Civil Technology
Overview
Autodesk
®
Civil 3D
®
2007 software is a powerful, mature, civil engineering application
designed to significantly increase productivity, save time, and decrease costs. It uses an
industry-proven dynamic engineering model that maintains intelligent object relationships,
so a change made in one place instantly updates your entire project to help you work
faster and more accurately.
Civil 3D and Land Desktop Compared
If you’ve never seen or tried Civil 3D, your first questions might be, Why bother? Isn’t Civil
3D just the “next version” of Autodesk
®
Land Desktop software? If not, how is it different
from Land Desktop?
Land Desktop (and its predecessors) has been the workhorse civil engineering design and
drafting application for engineering designs for more than a decade. And although it was
an integral part of countless numbers of successful projects, it had reached the limits of
what it could do based on the technical foundation on which it was built. Therefore,
Autodesk decided to create a new model-based tool for design professionals.
Unlike previous technology from Autodesk, Bentley, EaglePoint, and others, Civil 3D was
built from the ground up as a model-based, multiuser production tool that can help users
overcome the technical and industry challenges that most organizations face. These
challenges include the following:
• Synchronizing design elements and labels across many pages and among many
users
• The time-consuming task of revising designs and drafting
• Constant industry pressure to do more work with less staff
• Competition with other firms for the best people
• Lack of integration of engineering design applications and drafting tools for
creating final construction plan sets
Dynamic Model and Automated Annotation: As a project moves through the design
process, certain adjustments may be required that affect related elements in the project.
For example, if after designing a subdivision road, you determine that a fill slope
encroaches on a wetland area, you may need to adjust the horizontal and vertical
alignments to limit the affect on the wetlands. Using traditional software, this change
would require several tedious rework steps: erase original design; create new design;
draft new design; review for impact on wetlands; repeat as needed until design criteria are
satisfied.
Dynamically linked models in Civil 3D greatly reduce the time required to accomplish
these tasks. Civil 3D lets you create dynamically linked models of your project element
and annotation. In the simplest terms, dynamically linked models are related entities in a
drawing that automatically update when changes are made to one of the entities. These
entities include drawing objects that constitute the model itself (such as digital terrain
models, alignments, and corridors) and the annotation or labels associated with the
objects. The appearance and behavior of these objects and labels are controlled by
